Butter-Two-Face

Paula Deen said some bad things recently.

The fact that an old, southern woman might have within the language centers of her brain the capability to use words in a fashion commonly deemed as racially inappropriate seems to have come to a complete shock to America at-large, who are, astoundingly, treating this as more newsworthy than Kim Kardashian having recently whelped and naming the kid after the latter half of a Hitchcock movie, after she drew the Apples to Apples card referencing it during her last family game night. Everybody is fucking outraged that Paula Deen planned to organize a wedding themed with a level of social ignorance/ineptude I could only dream to attain. And then, by Mimir's Well, all the so-called journalists and investigators have dredged through this woman's life history for every single race-related social faux pas she'd perpetrated over the course of her long existence.

I'm not defending her; she said and did some stupid shit and she should suffer the consequences thereof. I'm not excusing her poor decisions based on her age or the social cues and mores she'd picked up during her upbringing that stuck with her, perhaps overtly and perhaps only subconsciously, the rest of her life. That said, America, get some goddamn perspective.

Why are we suddenly giving so great many fucks about the Queen of Butter and her verbiage? “Probably,” one might say, “because it's symptomatic of all the things we suspect about southern people but can't really prove.” The South does get the short end of the stick on racial issues more often than not (rightly so or otherwise I'll leave as an exercise for you to puzzle out on your own), and on such occasions the rest of the country can come together for snide chortling at the South's expense. After all, though Americans pretend otherwise, we are among the pettiest and most Schadenfreude-seeking people on the planet. We crave stories of other peoples' fuck-ups. How the hell else could reality television thrive?

The thing is, the media has treated this Paula Deen fracas with all the gravity of the average Entertainment Weekly So You Think You Can Dance? article. Editorial-writers (people doing the exact same thing as me, except their works are presented via ostensibly well-regarded publications or institutions) poo-poo their noses at the poor reflection on her character which this horror provides. This is inappropriate and wrong, and this sixty-six year old woman's racist history which we've gone out of our way to (re)construct, why, it's just scandalous!

Okay....and now what? Let's agree it's scandalous that this thing happened. Do we use our fervor to some noteworthy end or....No, we don't? We'll just be incensed for a short while then, watch things invariably die down, and return to a daily slog identical to the one before this media buzz began, except maybe Paula Deen is out of a job? Okay then.

Here's my take: Let's stop pretending that we as a society have a responsibility to engage in this farcical moralizing. Stop being disingenuous with your surprised cries that this isn't how Real America does it, that we're not all like this, and that Paula Deen is a social anomaly. Don't post to Facebook or Twitter how sad and shocked you are that someone like this exists in modern America and swear up and down that you'll never buy a Smithfield ham or cook anything in butter ever again. Don't even bother wringing your hands at the travesty of it all if you can't or won't nut up that shit like this is commonplace all across the country among all age demographics and not limited to people living in Bumfuck, Missalabameorgidennesstuckansolina who happened to have one black friend while growing up under Jim Crow.

Or, we could take this opportunity to have a frank discussion on race and racism in this country, both of the overt and institutionalized varieties. This would require that the members of the American media take something resembling an objective, empirical approach to the matter, like maybe bringing sociologists or political scientists who do research in that area onto their news programs rather than reinviting those old-hat demagogues (and you know who they are) who provide absolutely nothing of value and instead offer up only their own biased claims and exclamations.

One of these options is the much easier and more likely of the two, and that's why this screed is the only fuck I'm willing to give on the matter.